On this day of October 31st, in celebration of Halloween (Samhain), I present to you a gift from The Young Sinclairs: Ceto’s Return, a very scarce and long out-of-print album now available for free download via Bandcamp. We didn’t make many original copies, and they were all sold at shows and in a select few record stores. It’s a collection of recordings from the 2004-2006 period, and musically it’s on the dark and heavy tip. I’ll break down the album a little bit and give you some insight into each track:
1. Ceto’s Return
I had laid down a couple percussion tracks, a droning keyboard and acoustic guitar. I took that and then kind of set it aside just as a bare bones little instrumental drone piece – I then later decided to come back to it and add a drum kit, bass, and electric guitars. The vocals were ran through a Memory Man echo unit along with some other processor for the sickening phase effect. Ceto is a visitor from outer space I saw in a children’s book.
2. Young Man Blues
I took the Who’s arrangement of a Mose Allison tune and flipped it in a way that I imagined a group like Spacemen 3 or The Stooges might have approached it. Pretty simple: I laid down the drums, bass, two or three guitar tracks and then did the vocals through a Lafayette Echo-Verb unit.
3. Love To You
This is similar to the above tune in spirit except this time it was a takeoff on The Rolling Stone’s arrangement of Willie Dixon’s classic “I Just Want To Make Love To You”. I had put vocals on this at one point, but ended up wiping them cause they sounded lame. The electric guitar I’m playing on this was a ragged duct-taped Sears Roebuck that I used for a lot of the earliest Sinclairs recordings, this definitely being one of them.
4. El Tiempo De Las Flores (Time Of The Flowers)
I’ve got to give most of the credit to Sean Poff for the chordal composition on this one – though John Thompson and I helped flesh out the arrangement and added some melodic expansion. We had just started renting out an additional room at our studio, so we took equipment in and recorded this when it was basically empty. A lot of the reverb on here is completely natural – but we also added some spring reverb in post-production to some of the tracks. Sean and I are playing acoustic guitar, I think John is playing the glockenspiel. The percussion track is me hitting a pair of boots on the floor, one hand in each boot. I got the lyrics off the back of a record jacket, it’s actually some kind of traditional Hispanic tune.
5. What Once Was Mine
Another real early recording – again using the Sears Roebuck guitar. The smacking sound is me clapping my hands on the vocal track. I set out to copy the percussive and musical pattern of The Stooges’ “Little Doll” – I embellished it a bit and then improvised some vocals.
6. Just Give Up
This is John Thompson doing everything on this one. He used a pair of headphones as a microphone for all the tracks.
7. I Could Die
This is one of the earliest. A lot of tracks on here – lots of layers. The shaker percussion is actually a loop off a Serge Gainsbourg record….Sears Roebuck guitar through a Silvertone amp, Roland Juno synth drone, vocals through a Twin Reverb guitar amp – there’s actually no bass guitar on this track, I didn’t have one at the time!
8. 666 Child
The vibe for this song was inspired by the music of Them and also a 60′s California group called Things To Come. The drums are going though a Lafayette Echo-Verb unit – the organ is an Elka Panther. Another one where I had tried to lace some vocals but ended up opting for an instrumental.
9. Castle Song
Sean, John, and I laid out three kick drums on the floor and hit them with sticks and mallets for the first track here. Then we each played an open-tuned acoustic guitar and then I laid down a couple of crazed lead guitar tracks over everything. The main backing track actually repeats itself and plays through twice, so this is fairly epic.
